Nearly Free Seed

I'm always on the lookout for ways to reduce my gardening costs.  Primarily, this is because I am a tightwad.  A skinflint.  One cheap bastard.  I cringe when my wife wants to show me all the stuff she got when she returns from shopping.  My sons know better than to ask me to buy them stylish new jeans.  "New clothes for back-to-school?  Sure, hop in the car.  Ok, here we

Gleaning the Field

I harvested from the garden three times in the past week.  Tomatoes and summer squash are almost totally spent, but pole beans, yard-long beans, and winter squash are coming on strong.

This batch of veg is from September 17.  From the top, we have green yard-long beans, 2 butternut squash, eggplant, a few tomatoes, a moulin rouge sunflower head, cowpeas, a lone fig, and a pile of purple yard-long beans.

This is from September 21.  More of the same, although most of the tomatoes are cherry-type, there's basil there in the upper right corner...purple and green varieties, and a bunch of purple and green pole beans below them.

With supper that night, I cooked ditalini, a small macaroni-like pasta, then mixed in sliced cherry tomatoes, fresh basil, shredded cheese, vinagrette...chilled it in the fridge, and it was a hit.  My older son had seconds.

I'm also cooking the beans (pole and yard-long) in a tasty but very heart-unhealthy way.  I fry up 4 or 5 slices of bacon in a stockpot, take out the crisp bacon.  Add chicken broth or stock, add beans, salt, pepper, and crumble the bacon on top.  Stir, boil till tender, and serve.

This is from yesterday, September 22.  A branch of a bell pepper plant broke off in the rain, so I harvested 4 baby bells.  There are also 2 figs in the picture, but the big boy there is a crook-neck pumpkin that volunteered out of my compost pile.  He's got 3 younger brothers that haven't fully matured yet, so you will see more of these monsters soon.

Harvest Moon

Due to some of the usual start of the school year insanity at my workplace, I was only able to pick the garden twice in the past week.   

This first harvest was fast and hurried.  I was throwing produce into a basket as fast as I could one evening, slapping mosquitoes and trying to get it all picked before I lost daylight.  I was surprised and very happy to find a couple fat cukes.  I thought all my cucumber vines had died sad deaths, but the garden proved me wrong.

Despite that giant basket of veg picked earlier in the week, the weekend haul was still ridiculous. Left to right in this picture, we've got purple and green pole beans, green yard-long beans, sweet banana peppers, hot thai bird peppers, purple yard-long beans, and then the basket of tomatoes.  

I have been growing these red bird peppers for 8 years.  A neighbor gave me one of his plants, and I've been harvesting and drying the fruit and growing new plants from the seeds ever since.  These little hot peppers were the beginning of my gardening hobby, and I will always grow them.  Not only are they one of the most attractive plants I grow, they are also a fiery hot test of manhood.  I can count on them to reduce someone at my workplace into a gasping, crying, milk-guzzling pool of jelly at least once a year.

Yes, I am a bad man.  

This time of year, I still get a lot of cherry tomatoes, but larger types are in short supply.  I was able to pick 5 or 6 slicers, and I was happy to get them.  Many of my late-season cherry tomatoes are actually coming from volunteer plants that I allowed to mature...black cherry and ildi yellow varieties in particular.

September is the traditional harvest month, so I suppose it all makes sense.  My wife mentioned that Wednesday night there will be a Harvest Moon; the closest full moon to the autumn equinox...and a haunting Neil Young tune...

"But there's a full moon rising,

Let's go dancing in the light."